<p>Myth: Working hard gets you ahead in a free market economy.</p>
<p>Truth: Hard work should be relative to the importance of your job. Investment bankers often work 120 hour weeks. There's a reason for that; their jobs are important. They handle contracts worth millions of dollars to their respective companies, get paid bonuses at the end of the year depending on performance and it's a highly competitive field so you have to watch your back. If you work more than 40 hours at McDonalds however, you are a moron. No, I'm not talking about the single mother who has no other option, I'm talking about students working their as a summer job. Working at a McDonalds is not that important of a job, therefore if you try hard you fail at life. It's McDonalds, not Area 51, calm down Bruce Wayne. Does this mean you should be a lazy slob? No. This means it's more important to work smart than it is to work hard. Mess on the floor? Wait till the boss or manager walks by before cleaning up. Can you do a job in 30 minutes? Tell them you can do it in an hour and finish in 45, you look much better that way. These jobs don't matter, you can afford to take off early and say you worked the extra half hour. Hard work is for suckers. Smart work gets you ahead. </p>
<p>Example: This summer, I worked for a firm, I won't say what it did but it handled pretty big contracts and hired lots of unimportant underlings to take care of them. Anyways, for three months in a row we had this one guy "win" the award for employee of the month at a bank he was contracted to do. He did his job so well the bank manager even gave us a letter of recommendation that he was an awesome worker, without being asked no less. Unfortunately, for our poor employee of the month, he did his job so effectively that the company refused to move him to a better higher paying position in fear of losing their customer, the bank. As a result, this guy never got a raise beyond the max amount for bank workers (which was a fair bit, but not nearly as much as he could have made) while people who were WORST and had less senority in the company than he did got moved up to better, higher paying positions (including me). How did we do it? We worked smart. And no, we were not unionized either.</p>
<p>Myth 2: Hard work gets you noticed</p>
<p>Truth: No, knowing people in the right positions get you noticed. The old adage, it's not what you know, it's who you know. </p>
<p>Example: I got a nice full time job right out of high school in the IT industry. I was hired by a hospital to do tech support. Of all the six guys in my office, only 1 got the job purely on knowledge, the others all knew someone in the hospital. One of which was a guy who had recently been kicked out of his house for playing too much Everquest (I'm not kidding). Anyways, he went to his friend who worked in the office with me and asked him to get him a cushy office job which he did. This guy knew nothing about tech support, so we put him in the corner office away from the manager's prying eyes. Everyday he'd walk into the office and go to sleep or play Everquest. Well one day, this guy came in, went to sleep and went into a diabetic coma (good thing we worked in a hospital!). After that, HE STILL WORKED FOR US. The only reason he was fired was because he accidentially infected one of the computers with the ILOVEYOU virus. Do you honestly think office parties are just office parties or a chance to schmooze? Office politics applies to everyone, learn the inner workings of every office you work in. Face time, face time, face time!</p>
<p>Conclusion: So, does this mean hard work gets you nowhere? Of course, not. KNowing the right people may get your foot in the door but unless you're the boss' nephew, you still need to know your s---t. Hard work, in the Batman sense (Batman works 80 hours straight in the comics sometimes), is incredibly stupid. It's also relative to the importance of your job. A lowly cashier at a fast food resteraunt, and believe me, I've been one, is not that important in the grand scheme of things and should focus their attention to getting ahead in more unscrupulous ways than good honest hard work. The security guards that watch the apartment building across the street from me bring books and read all the time because they know that: 1) It's an incredibly safe neighbourhood and the only reason they're there is because of the paranoid trust fund babies who live there and think they live in the ghetto. 2) They work 12 hour shifts and get paid up to $14/hour to do it. Hard work? Nope. Smart work? For what they're doing, hell yeah.</p>
<p>Hey and if you don't believe me, look at your current president. I know you're all glad that only in America can the humble son of a former President and rise up and be THE PRESIDENT one day.</p>